Hopefully someone has run into a similar issue and can help me out. We are doing a large datapump export to save as a historical archive. The database is 10.2.0.4. Since this version of expdp will not compress and not allow compressing to a named pipe, we used the following parameters: PARALLEL=8 FILESIZE=10GB EXCLUDE=TRIGGER COMPRESSION=METADATA_ONLY METRICS=Y FULL=Y FLASHBACK_TIME="TO_TIMESTAMP('09-03-2013 06:00:00', 'DD-MM-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')" Space is tight so the plan was to compress the files after they reached their 10GB limit. We did that and at a later time, expdp tried to access one of them again. At what point in time can we guarantee that the export process will not try to access the file again? Below is the error we received. Thanks Keith ORA-31693: Table data object "PWRLINE"."SETTLESHADOWNIDR" failed to load/unload and is being skipped due to error: ORA-31617: unable to open dump file "/DB_EXPORT/expdp_LDSTPRD_2013-03-09_06:00:00_06.dmp" for write ORA-19505: failed to identify file "/DB_EXPORT/expdp_LDSTPRD_2013-03-09_06:00:00_06.dmp" ORA-17503: ksfdopn:4 Failed to open file /DB_EXPORT/expdp_LDSTPRD_2013-03-09_06:00:00_06.dmp ORA-17500: ODM err:File does not exist ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 3 ORA-08180: no snapshot -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l